BOOKS OF THE TIMES; An Aura of Mystery Still Hovers Around the Man Who Is Deep Throat

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: July 6, 2005

Deep Throat, aka W. Mark Felt, aka ''the Secret Man'' of Bob Woodward's new book, was the most famous anonymous source in modern American political history. And thanks to the 1976 movie ''All the President's Men,'' he also became an iconic symbol of the secret truth teller. He was the man in the raincoat in the shadows in the garage, the tortured world-weary source who guided the brash Mr. Woodward and his partner, Carl Bernstein, through the Watergate labyrinth, the insider turned informant who helped expose the Nixon administration's abuse of power -- its misappropriation of campaign funds, its attempts to bend the C.I.A. and F.B.I. to its own ends, its efforts to smear the political opposition and intimidate the press.

''The Secret Man'' provides an intriguing if not fully satisfying portrait of the real-life relationship between Mr. Woodward and Mr. Felt, and it reaffirms the vital role that confidential sources play in keeping the public informed. Deep Throat's identity remained a mystery for more than 30 years, and his repeated insistence on what Mr. Woodward calls in these pages ''secrecy at all cost'' suggests that today's media-bashing climate -- when reporters' right to keep sources secret is under attack -- could well inhibit sources like Mr. Felt from stepping forward.

The book also reminds us that without Mr. Felt and a host of other confidential sources, the course of history might have been very different: the Woodstein efforts to unlock the Watergate scandal could easily have stalled, and without their articles in The Washington Post a special prosecutor would most likely not have been appointed, Congressional investigations and impeachment inquiries would not have got off the ground and President Nixon would not have been forced from office.

While ''The Secret Man'' yields yet another angle on the perennial puzzle of Watergate, it does not provide political junkies with much hard news. The revelation that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt, a former No.2 official at the F.B.I., was made a month ago in Vanity Fair magazine by members of Mr. Felt's family, and in a subsequent Washington Post article Mr. Woodward basically set forth an outline of this book, detailing his complex, often tortuous relationship with his source.

In fact, much of this book's narrative consists of the author's dovetailing accounts of the work he and Mr. Bernstein did in piecing together the Watergate scandal (accounts that will be highly familiar to anyone who has read their 1974 best seller ''All the President's Men'') with accounts of Mr. Felt's experiences at the F.B.I., which were laid out in his own far less famous 1979 book, ''The FBI Pyramid From the Inside,'' in which the author asserted that he had ''never leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein or to anyone else!''

Scattered here and there in ''The Secret Man'' are some interesting tidbits. Mr. Woodward reveals that The Washington Post might have had its own leaker -- possibly in the paper's legal department -- who was providing ''information to the Justice Department and the White House'' and that ''the White House apparently came very close to establishing that one of our sources was Felt.''

Mr. Woodward also says he learned in 1976 that an assistant attorney general, Stanley Pottinger, had more or less figured out Mr. Felt's secret identity, but kept mum about his discovery. During grand jury testimony on another matter, Mr. Pottinger said, a member of the jury asked Mr. Felt if he was Deep Throat; when Mr. Pottinger reminded the witness that he was under oath and asked if he would like the question withdrawn, Mr. Felt flushed and quickly said, ''Withdraw the question.''

What ''The Secret Man'' does not do is shed light on many of the lingering mysteries of Deep Throat, like how Mr. Felt managed to monitor Mr. Woodward's apartment balcony to see if the reporter had set out the flowerpot with a red flag, their signal for calling a secret late-night meeting. Mr. Woodward also writes that he never learned how Mr. Felt knew in November 1973 that the Nixon tapes contained deliberate erasures, since he had retired from the F.B.I. several months earlier.

For that matter, the portrait of Deep Throat that emerges from this volume is in many ways as enigmatic as the one that appeared in ''All the President's Men.'' While Deep Throat's name has been revealed, the mystery of his identity -- his personality, the competing claims of pride and guilt on his conscience -- remains.

Mr. Woodward, whose books routinely plow ahead with little analysis and context, can only speculate about Mr. Felt's reasons for talking to The Washington Post. Like many journalists before him, he suggests a complex mix of motives: Mr. Felt's realization that ''the system of justice had been so polluted and corrupted and politicized by Nixon and his men that the F.B.I. could never get to the bottom of Watergate''; longstanding bitterness at the efforts of the Nixon White House to manipulate the F.B.I. for political ends; resentment, after J. Edgar Hoover's death, at being passed over for the top job; anger at the cozy, complicit relationship the new acting director L. Patrick Gray had with the Nixon White House; and a simple love of ''the game,'' based on his early training as a spy hunter.